The cliche question all authors hate:
"Where do you get your ideas?"
The idea is the easy part. The idea is so easy to get, you can't give them away. I'm here to give them away, to share them, and invite you to recognize yours. We're all creative. Not all of us pay attention.

Saturday, January 30, 2016

Trolling is not a new phenomenon, as any teacher or performer can tell you. There's an irreducible number of people who feel that enthusiasm is ridiculous and get some sort of satisfaction out of baiting people. I'm not talking about giving people enough rope to hang themselves, which can be a useful service - I'm talking about poking people until they holler for one's own amusement.

Once upon a time, this could only be done face-to-face, which inevitably made it personal and potentially risky. Then the advent of news media made it possible to use op-ed pages and hoaxing to poke people at one remove. But the internet brings trolling into the realm of the casual hobby - it is now possible to annoy more people than ever before, with less effort. Social media, e-mail, websites, comment sections - stir the pot and laugh at how angry people get, feel the power of your idle nastiness, without any danger of being hit on the nose or becoming persona non grata in every venue in town (because town is infinitely large and you can always move on). It's wholesale, impersonal bullying, and it's practically consequence free. Even if it advances to cyberstalking and illegal activity, if you choose your victims well, no one's likely to be able to bring you to book for it.

But what if you poke the wrong bear one too many times?

The same qualities of the internet that protect you from the wrath of your victims, make you vulnerable to the skilled user who decides to turn the tables on you.

Thrillers do not necessarily require a sympathetic protagonist; personally I prefer them because if I'm going to be spending time with them I want to be able to root for them. Nor do I personally enjoy stories that are raining vengeance down on the head of the evil protagonist; they leave me with a nasty taste in my mouth. But the obvious angle here is the troll as protagonist. Maybe it's someone who targets people for what she believes are moral reasons - I don't suppose many of us would feel too bad about a troll whipping up the social media of the KKK into foaming frenzies. Yet it should be clear from the outset that this is an excuse, and that her moral superiority to her targets is problematic at best. She has proper activist outlets available to her, of which she does not avail herself, and she's apt to go for the motes in the eyes of others while ignoring the beam in her own. In her real life she feels powerless, and rather than taking real-world action to correct this, she takes out her feelings being an anonymous internet bully.

For best results, her situation should be a hard one; her weakness and cowardice should be of a sort and in a style that will rouse the audience to say "yes I see but," not "oh get off your butt and do something about it." She is redeemable, but has a steep character arc and some hard lessons to learn before the audience will be ready to embrace her.

So we have someone who smothers fragility in smugness and seeks self-esteem in emotional sadism because she doesn't know any other way to get it. Probably there's something/someone she truly cares about besides herself - a sibling, perhaps, or a pet or a friend. She is young because trolling is a young person's game. She has a lot of time on her hands, much of which she might prefer to spend doing something else but for some reason (disability? Restrictive life circumstances?) is trapped at her computer instead, and trolling relieves her frustration. And she eventually takes that frustration out in the wrong venue, on the wrong person.

Most people, when they realize they're being trolled, are content to shut the troll down - block the username from private space; petition to get it banned in a public, moderated one; turn off anon posting; simply stop replying. But our protagonist hits someone on a very sore spot indeed; and this particular person is the troll's evil double, only more so. Someone with a similar base personality, possibly even a similar base situation to the protagonist, but someone who has concluded that the best defense for the squishy miserable self is a strong offense. Threats are not walked away from - they are turned on, and annihilated.

At first it's fun, going head-to-head with someone playing the same game; but it's not a game to the Other anymore, it's deadly serious. Other is very, very good at finding people's buttons, much better than Troll, and Troll soon finds that having your buttons pressed with unerring accuracy, repeatedly, is no fun at all. (The reader is allowed to think "Serves you right" at this point.) When she finds herself weeping after a hit that strikes at the core of her situation she tries to detach.

But that's not good enough for Other. Hacking her social media, identity theft, online spying - things Troll would never have thought of doing because they'd destroy her sense of moral high ground are fair game for Other. Real life consequences start to accumulate, and her initial situation becomes steadily worse.

The threat that forces her to stop retreating and taking pot-shots from the shadows is not likely to be to her directly. If we are too cowardly to stand up for ourselves, we pretty much have to bottom out to do it; if cowardice is paired with low self-esteem, we are likely to assume that bottoming out is no more than we deserve. No, what forces her to turn is that thing/person/pet she truly cares about. Because of course the Other finds out what that thing/person/pet is, and goes for it.

We will be brave and effective for those we love, even when we wouldn't raise a hand to save ourselves.

She will need to learn new skills for this. She will need to confront herself and the depth of the resemblance between herself and her persecutor. She will probably need an ally, and for maximum impact this should be someone she has no right to expect help from, someone she's bullied, who knows who she is and what she does and whose first response is to say: "Serve you right." Someone who will show her what generosity looks like.

It is not necessary for the ending to, strictly speaking, be happy. If Troll finds a core of true worth and breaks out of her old behavior pattern, she does not need to destroy Other. She can even be destroyed (in one sense or another) herself. Work out what she loves and the nature of Other's threat to it, and the emotionally satisfying climax, in which perhaps she loses and wins at once, or wins by changing the definition of losing (she and Other having shared a twisted set of rules between them) will emerge naturally.

About Me

Author of the YA story about meeting your idols above, time travel fantasies 11,000 Years Lost, Switching Well, and A Dig in Time; Edgar-nominated mysteries The Ghost Sitter and The Treasure Bird; and 7 other middle-grade novels. Plus the stuff that's not published yet.

Glossary

Bruce, Dr. Bruce = our male cat, Thai's brother
Campaign = a connected series of role-playing adventures
Clovis = technology developed in the late Ice Age in the Americas, characterized by beautiful and elegant spear points; by extension, the people who used this technology
Con = Convention or conference, i.e. gathering of like-minded souls
Damon = My husband, Michael D. Griffin. No, D. does not stand for Damon.
D&D, AD&D, 3E, 3.5, 3.75, 4E = various iterations of Dungeons and Dragons, the original role-playing game
Fen = Plural of fan; refers specifically to individuals involved in the constellation of related fandoms that game, read comics, read science fiction and fantasy, etc.
Fortean, Forteana = Weird, inexplicable stuff
Game = Unless otherwise specified, table top roleplaying
LARP = Live-action role playing. Not the kinky stuff, the wholesome playing-make-believe-in-the-wood kind.
Megafauna = Big Animals. Usually, the mammalian megafauna of the Pleistocene
Mid-grade = in publishing, the grades between easy reader and high school level, i.e. variously between 7-14 depending on the kid and the publisher
Moby Dick, Moby Dent, Moby = the great white car
Pleistocene = Ice Age
Recreationist = LARPing with a serious purpose, such as re-fighting Civil War battles without casualties, to understand historical experience better
SCA = Society for Creative Anachronism, recreating the European middle ages the way they should have been
soulsucking day job = every day job I ever had; mostly they were perfectly good jobs. I just don't belong in one.
Speed = Caffeine. Yes, I'm that sensitive.
Table top roleplaying game = Make believe with rules, dice, paper, and pens.
Thai, Miss Thai = our female cat, Bruce's sister
WIP = Work in Progress
YA = Young Adult, in publishing. A flexible term that can refer to an audience as young as 13 and as old as 21.